When performing an audit, it has long been conventional for auditors to prepare schedules, analyses, transcriptions, memos, and confirmation results to be included in one or more documents generally referred to as work papers. These work papers serve as the basis for documenting the work performed by the auditor during the auditor's examination and evaluation of an entity's accounting and/or financial records—in the case of a financial audit—or, policies and operations—in the case of an internal or compliance audit. The work papers may ultimately be relied upon to support an auditor's opinion regarding the financial “fairness” of the financial statements, or an opinion expressing the extent to which an entity is in compliance with a certain set of internal or external policies and regulations.
During the audit process, it is customary for auditors to manually (e.g., by hand) annotate the work papers with various symbols, commonly referred to as tick marks, to convey certain information about the audit process. For example, as illustrated in FIG. 1, an auditor may place a checkmark symbol 10 next to a particular item in the work papers 12 to indicate that the auditor examined corresponding source documents 14 related to the particular item. If, for example, the item in the work papers is a brief statement regarding the value of a particular financial asset, a checkmark symbol 10 placed next to the brief statement may be used to indicate that the auditor has verified the accuracy of the brief statement by examining one or more supporting financial documents 14 associated with the corresponding financial asset. Different tick mark symbols may be used to convey different information about the audit process. The meaning of each type of tick mark can typically be found in a tick mark legend 16, which is often included with or attached to the work papers 12.
Although tick marks have long been associated with the audit process, tick marks are also frequently used by internal accounting personnel when preparing documents, such as regulatory filings. Despite the increased reliance on modern computer and software systems for preparing documents and performing audit-related tasks, the practice of using tick marks has changed very little. For instance, when using conventional database, document processing and spreadsheet applications to prepare documents and/or perform audit-related tasks, accounting personnel and auditors will frequently utilize one or more numbers, letters or symbols, such as an asterisk (“*”), as electronic versions of tick mark symbols. In some cases, the Microsoft Wingdings® font, which renders characters as a variety of symbols, is used to represent various tick mark symbols. In any case, the characters representing the tick mark symbols are typically generated within the framework of whatever conventional document processing or spreadsheet application is being used. For example, using a spreadsheet application, an auditor may place an asterisk (“*”) in a cell of a worksheet to convey some information about a value in a neighboring cell of the worksheet.
Utilizing electronic tick mark symbols with conventional database, document processing and spreadsheet applications poses a variety of problems. First, with conventional database, document processing and spreadsheet applications, it is extremely easy to modify data and/or create a new copy or version of a document or file. Consequently, a tick mark symbol present in one version of a document or file may become lost or corrupt on subsequent versions of the document or file. Furthermore, an item or value presented in one document may be dependent (e.g., by means of a reference, formula, or link) upon an item or value in one or more other documents. Consequently, an item or value associated with a particular tick mark may change, thereby causing the tick mark and its corresponding legend to become irrelevant or invalid. In addition, the tick mark legend that explains the meaning of each tick mark symbol may become lost, disassociated or stale, thereby rendering tick marks included in a particular document or file irrelevant or invalid. Finally, even when a tick mark in a document or file is valid, the tick mark and its associated entry in the tick mark legend may not provide sufficient and relevant information regarding the validation and verification process, or the supporting documents, files and database items that have been referenced by an auditor. These shortcomings frequently cause unwanted errors, wasted efforts and higher costs associated with manually reviewing and re-reviewing successive versions of documents to ensure that they are correct.